Just My Imagination

Wish I'd figured this out ages ago. Every now and then a new application I install on my Mac won't open. It bounces on the dock for a bit when I try to open it and then quits suddenly and without explanation. The trick is to open it from the command line so you can see the message about why it quit. You don't have to know what that is. Just open the application Terminal, and then type in:
/Applications/name_of_app.app/Contents/MacOS/name_of_app
...and it should do the dock-bouncing routine and then tell you something extraordinarily clear and helpful like:
Unable to load nib file: Monitor.nib, exiting
(sigh)
and then you type that into your search engine of choice for much more helpful answers than you were getting when all you could search was "Application X is broken, help!"

Tada! Things work again. :)

I'm sure error messages are stored in a log somewhere if you open a program from the GUI, but I couldn't find it, and this worked.

It's Black Friday in the U.S. today, the first day of big holiday sales. I got up early and went shopping. I bought an external hard drive I'd been waiting on for a while and some clothes. It's the first time I'd been shopping specifically for this event, and I was a bit underwhelmed. Best Buy had a few deals on specific electronics and movies, but most items were just their regular prices...yet the store was very busy at 8 in the morning. Old Navy had some one-day deals but if you looked closely they weren't too different from its regular sale prices. I spent a couple hours looking around and then went off to a hockey game (go Ducks!)

Then I got home and found this on the news.

I want to return everything I bought. This makes me ashamed and sick. I'm grateful for handmade holidays growing up and I'm planning on one this year.

I was kind of excited for the economic crisis to lead to less
consumerism this holiday season, but it seems like people are running
scared and desperate.

Does this kind of stuff happen every year? It's the first time I've
paid attention to Black Friday. I went shopping today and now I feel
ashamed.

I just got back from the Big Scary Thing that was taking up most of my semester, leading a team for the previously mentioned Cluster Challenge competition.

Quick summary is: teams of undergraduates from different universities team up with vendor partners (who give them hardware) and build cluster computers, then optimize open source scientific applications to run on them most effectively. During the competition, the teams get about 45 hours to complete as many application data sets as they can on their machines, then answer questions about their preparation and knowledge of high performance computing.

I very much liked the "feel" of Austin (music and...hippies? in Texas?) although we didn't spend too much time outside. The competition itself was interesting. The way things turned out we were the only new team there (all the others had done it last year, although some of the team members were new). A lot of the work we put in throughout the semester turned out not to help us proportionally in the end, and some things we could have spend a little more time on and it would have gotten us far...like really understanding what the scientific applications did. Overall I think we did rather well considering we were working with a brand-new platform that the applications weren't designed for (the new Windows HPC Server). I feel like the whole process was a good application of the "wisdom of no escape" for me, I learned a whole bunch about hardware, compilers, and working with Windows that I would have had a hard time discovering with independent study. It's funny to think that almost exactly two years ago I had no idea what an operating system was, and after all this I honestly think I'm now capable of putting together my own cluster.

I'm really happy about the team who won (Indiana/Dresden) because they came darn prepared and were the friendliest, most helpful team we talked to.

I feel a bit funny now. I've been catching up on sleep since I got back and trying to figure out what to do next. I have a semester to finish and need to try to catch up on my other classes, but I still feel a bit at a loss now that this is over. It was supposed to be the last thing I did in the field of high performance computing, because I decided last semester that I wasn't as passionate about the area as I would like to be. I need to find a summer internship now, hopefully in something (as my boss would say) I'm relatively passionate about. I'd been waiting to be "free" to choose my next direction for a while, but now that I am I feel a bit lost. I think it's time to go find some inspiration and motivation so I can come up with some action items and maybe take on something new.

I'm off to Austin for a week for the Supercomputing 2008 Cluster Challenge.

We're the Cray and Microsoft team (don't ask!)

I'll write more when I get back, scrambling to get ready at the moment. The boys are packing their XBoxes and I'm bringing a bag of crafty stuff. Nothing like some Gears of War or an intense needlefelting session to destress. Man, nervous and excited.